The "alt-right" is a loose association of Internet-famous white nationalists who concocted a hip-sounding pseudonym for their bigotry in the hopes of scoring more cable-news appearances and/or West Wing appointments. In the aftermath of Donald Trump's election, some of the movement's staunchest adherents, thirsty for mainstream acceptance, have shied away from public displays of hate in an effort to protect the fragile political power structure built by their army of Pepe avatars.

Other prominent figures, though, have been less willing to abide by restrictions on their ability to spew racist dogma in typo-ridden 140-character bursts. And when disagreements arise among angry people with sizable Twitter followings, things tend to go downhill very quickly.

Here's how the movement's latest airing of 4chan-inspired dirty laundry unfolded. An Inauguration Day event called the "DeploraBall 2017" boasts a VIP guest list composed of fake-news disseminators, conspiracy theorists, and at least one former adviser to the president-elect of the United States. As of Tuesday, though, one Internet celebrity who will not be in attendance is Timothy Treadstone, better known as Baked Alaska. After Treadstone tweeted some truly gross anti-Semitic nonsense for God knows what reason, Deploraball organizer and date-rape denier Mike Cernovich slid into Treadstone's DMs, demanding that he not be so damn obvious about his anti-Semitism. Naturally, Treadstone immediately screenshotted those DMs and shared them with the world.

Burned, Cernovich responded by abruptly revoking Treadstone's invitation to Deploraball and announcing that a different alt-right Internet person, social-media goon Milo Yiannopoulos, would be attending in his place. The war for legitimacy was on, as this development caused Treadstone to don his best camouflage and stand in front of an American flag to deliver a 45-plus-minute diatribe in which he basically calls everyone on Twitter a cuck.

Cernovich is a huge cuck. Mike Cernovich is a massive cuck.

I am alt-right. I have always been alt-right. I have never said I'm not
alt-right, unlike Mike and Paul Joseph Watson and Milo and these other
cucks.

Yes, even Racist Twitter is susceptible to public meltdowns and juvenile infighting. But what's happening to the so-called "alt-right" is the same phenomenon that has plagued countless social movements throughout history: A wildly diverse group of self-professed underdogs formed an uneasy alliance to promote a specific purpose, but now that they have accomplished that goal, they find themselves tied up in competing claims of authority. When movements are unable to arrive at a consensus about what to do next, their once-promising partnerships promptly crumble. The Baked Alaska Deploraball saga is dumb and petty and small, but it illustrates how the nascent alt-right movement could, if things break just right, end up evaporating just as quickly as it came together.

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